MINSK, 13 November (BelTA) – Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko talked about last year's riots in Belarus as he gave an interview with Igor Korotchenko, a military expert and Editor-in-Chief of the Russian magazine Natsionalnaya Oborona [national defense]on 9 November, BelTA has learned.
"A year has passed since then. We are now into the second year. Why can't we give these events an unambiguous assessment… Because new aspects, new facts emerge. That's for first. Secondly, we thought it was a color revolution. You know, flowers, berries, tulips... No, it was nothing like that. It was a mutiny. A blitzkrieg. They were not going to play a long game here because it was useless. A long scenario is impossible in Belarus," the head of state said.
He said that after they failed to break down the law enforcement forces on the streets by using sharpeners, Molotov cocktails, they enacted another scenario. Girls in short skirts and white coats with flowers took to the streets: "Another scenario began. The military, riot policemen, guarding the monuments to Soviet soldiers, were approached by beautiful girls who would hug them, gave them flowers..."
"This is Gene Sharp's playbook," Igor Korotchenko said.
"Exactly. We saw and understood all this," the president confirmed.
He also said that he instructed the defense minister to make a statement about the monuments: "I asked him to warn them [participants of mass riots] that if they attempt to damage the monuments, they would face the army, not riot police." "We would have responded very tough if they tried to desecrate the monuments," Aleksandr Lukashenko noted.
The president stated that more and more new facts about last year's events emerge and they need to be analyzed, because “at that time we did not have time to think who was behind these riots and what role other countries, Poland, Ukraine, Latvia or Germany, played in them. “There were more important things to deal with back then. They had to be stopped. We did everything to stop them. In the process we realized that it was not a color revolution. It was a chosen moment. The big goal is one and the same - to complete the belt [the so-called belt of instability or a sanitary cordon around Russia, of which Belarus could become a part],” the Belarusian leader said.
In this regard, Aleksandr Lukashenko recalled the collapse of the USSR and the arrival of U.S. President Bill Clinton in Minsk, which he described as a visit of support for Belarusian nationalists. "He flew in here and went to Kuropaty, which the opposition always describes as the place of Stalin's repressions. Although Germans shot and buried people there too. But they needed symbols. Clinton went there and held talks with them. It was a visit of support for our nationalists. But then they lost the presidential election a year or two later. Therefore, they see me as an enemy," the president said. “Then came the referendum on the Union State with Russia, the new Constitution. It was I who held the referendum on the Union State with Russia. Yes, I am a pro-Russian person. I'm not denying that. I respect my past. I was actually born not far from Smolensk, in Orsha, a border town. I am a historian; I went to the Soviet school. I still have it in me. I did not give up on the communist past when I became president."
